Reviewing these books in tandem is like comparing chalk with cheese. Both Allan Megill and Randy Martin claim to center their arguments on Marx, but only Megill makes good on the claim. Indeed, what needs saying right off the bat is that Megill's Karl Marx which sheds considerable light on Marx, is by far the better book. Martin's On Your Marx by contrast, casts very little light on Marx (or anyone else). Calling attention, in one of his happier turns of phrase, to “the tinniness with which rightist clarions of triumph now sound” (p. 13), Martin says but does not show that “(h)istory has not erased Marx, but vindicated him” (p. xiv), and that Marx remains “indispensable as a point of reference” (p. xv).

Peter Meilaender has written one of the only single-author books on the ethics of immigration policy, and perhaps the only one that defends the position that “states are entitled, within certain wide limits, to craft immigration policies as they see fit” (p. 1). Most normative work on immigration, as he notes, supports the position that states are more ethically constrained in making immigration policy, much of it arguing for an “open borders” policy. As such, his book may serve as a useful point of reference in the debate over immigration policy.

Norma Claire Moruzzi's recent book contributes significantly to the emergent and increasingly sophisticated literature on Hannah Arendt. Entitled Speaking Through the Mask Moruzzi's text filters a careful reading of Arendt through an innovative lens that combines Kristevan psychoanalysis and Joan Rivière's concept of social identity as masquerade. This filter, clearly hospitable to the language of performativity, works to read Arendt against herself, and to query the sharp Arendtian distinction between the categories of the social and the political—that is, between an embodied, immanent social identity and the freedom of a political life that can reach beyond such immanence. Embodied reality need not be deprived of political engagement, the author argues, but can serve as the vehicle through which private individuals enter meaningfully into the public sphere.

In Prejudicial Appearances a primary essay on the nature of American antidiscrimination law by Robert Post is followed by four responsive essays. Post's essay effectively analyzes the way that the ostensible goals of antidiscrimination law fail to gibe with the law's actual application. According to Post, it is generally understood that the intention of antidiscrimination law is to render certain characteristics, such as gender and race, as a practical matter, invisible to those making hiring and other employment decisions. The law embraces the goal of “functional rationality.” Employers must not be allowed to rely irrationally upon prejudice in their decision-making process. Rather, they must, as President Clinton averred about gays and lesbians in the military, be judged by what they do and not by who they are. Post describes this as “the dominant conception” of antidiscrimination law.

“Every man, I suppose, has his political opinions,” Michael Oakeshott once asserted, “but a political philosopher has something more, and more significant, than political opinions: he has an analysis of political activity, a comprehensive view of the nature of political life, and it is this … which is profitable for a later and different age to study” (Oakeshott, “Thomas Hobbes,” Scrutiny 4 [1935–36]: 265). Terry Nardin seems inspired by Oakeshott to take this attitude a step further, as if to say a political philosopher may have an analysis of political activity, but a philosopher has something more significant, a comprehensive view of human experience, and it is this that is profitable for a later age to study. Thus, the title of Nardin's book, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott holds the nugget of his thesis: Michael Oakeshott was a philosopher, and it is as a philosopher, not a political theorist or a moralist or a historian of ideas, that we must first come to know him.

Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Alexis de Tocqueville are commonly known for their critique of liberal democracy. However, in a fascinating new study, Morton Schoolman marshals novel readings of each theorist to argue for the value of a democratic polity in creating and sustaining what he terms “aesthetic individuality,” an ethical disposition toward the other that values difference as a resource in the ongoing project of forming the self.

James Young wants political theorists to attend to Henry Adams (1838–1918), and they should. In certain ways, Adams is easy to admire. He is a splendid writer; he wrote a good deal, and nearly every sentence is perfect. He was a witty and urbane professor of history at Harvard and later he was a wry and wise Washington insider with powerful aesthetic faculties. As his America rapidly changed, he tried to master the new forms of knowledge needed to understand it.